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Apache CloudStack — IAC 101
Run your cloud as code: GitLab, OpenBao, OpenTofu, EVE-NG, n8n and SONiC — the whole open-source GitOps toolchain, end to end, on one laptop
Every click in a cloud console is a decision that leaves no record. This book runs Apache CloudStack the way platform teams run everything else: as code in GitLab, secrets in OpenBao, provisioning in OpenTofu, alerting you own with n8n and local AI agents, the fabric automated with Ansible — the whole open-source GitOps toolchain, working end to end, on one laptop.
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About
About the Book
The CloudStack web interface is a comfortable place to work and a dangerous place to live. Every click does something useful — and leaves no record of itself. Six months later, the only account of why the production network looks the way it does lives in one administrator's memory, and possibly a wiki page that stopped being true in March. The estate that can only be rebuilt by the person who built it is not an estate you own; it is one you are renting from your own staff, and the lease ends the day they hand in their notice.
This book takes a different position: run an Apache CloudStack estate the way a modern platform team runs everything else — as code, in version control, with secrets in a vault, and every change shipped through a pipeline that anyone can read and no one can bypass. Then it builds the entire toolchain, open source end to end, on a single reproducible reference lab: one laptop running Ubuntu Server 24.04, KVM, and CloudStack 4.22 LTS. A whole cloud you can carry to a coffee shop.
The toolchain, in the order it arrives:
- GitLab CE as the single source of truth — repositories, Git Flow, and the CI/CD pipelines that turn a merged change into a real one
- OpenBao for secrets — every CloudStack credential fetched on demand and expired on a timer, never committed to Git
- OpenTofu with the CloudStack provider — the estate declared in HCL, planned before it is applied, with state, modules, remote state and drift detection
- EVE-NG — a place to break the network before it is real
- n8n with the Guardian and Phoenix agents — sovereign alerting, with local AI classifying incidents and attempting fixes, the whole incident path inside your own stack
- SONiC and Ansible — the switching fabric configured from version control like everything else
Along the way it makes the honest cost case (a canonical worked scenario showing an illustrative 94% saving over a licensed stack, every line flagged for verification against current pricing) and closes with the production practices and deployment checklist that turn the reading into a working discipline. The through-line is the Mars heuristic: if this system were running unattended and the link home were cut, would it still work? Codify the step, or it does not count.
Every tool in these pages is one you host, control, and can inspect to the bottom.
Author
About the Author
Michael Hinsley
Mike Hinsley has spent more than three decades with his hands on real infrastructure — from electronics and engineering through operations, security, cloud and SaaS — and has never lost the habit of wanting to understand the machine all the way down. He is the founder of a UK infrastructure consultancy that helps organisations escape per‑core licensing lock‑in by migrating from VMware/Broadcom to sovereign, self‑owned platforms built on Apache CloudStack, with documented client savings of up to 94%. His guiding principle is one he calls GYOCYO — Grow Your Own, Cook Your Own: own the means of a capability rather than rent it as a finished product. He lives it literally. From a smallholding in rural Cheshire he runs large‑scale aquaponics, IoT‑monitored beehives, and a 28.8 kW solar array backed by 90 kWh of battery storage — the same instrument‑everything, owe‑nothing‑to‑anyone thinking he brings to enterprise clients, proven first on his own land. His HIVE‑DC concept — a data centre in a beehive — grew directly out of that overlap. Mike previously presented "Aquaponics, Apiculture, and Advanced Networking with Apache CloudStack" at the CloudStack European User Group in London. He publishes under the Leaf Spine Books imprint, and is preparing to establish a sustainable‑technology education centre uniting aquaponics, beekeeping and cloud infrastructure under one roof.
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